2. Why should parents encourage children to have ambitions?

Because goals are crucial to school success and even the world outside of education. Setting and tracking goals helps our child learn important life skills such as planning, organization, and time management while also building communication skills, self-awareness, and confidence. I mean, encouraging children to set their own ambitions, it can provide a clear path to their success. When our child sets goals, it gives him or her steps to follow, so tasks are completed according to importance. This allows more time and energy to be spent on the next step in achieving his or her goal.  For example, parents can encourage their children to set a goal of getting higher scores at school not by pushing, forcing or nagging them to study harder, but by keeping them motivated by a reward system. 

3. Should parents interfere with children’s ambitions?

I think they shouldn’t. The decisions we make in our early life, for example, what school we go to, the subjects we chose to study, the decision to go to university/college, the courses we choose can impact our career path. If this decision is heavily swayed by parental preference, the child may end up following a vocation that, deep down, they aren’t interested in. I believe that everyone has a unique set of skills and aptitudes, and each child is individual in their own way, and so may possess different skills and abilities to their parents. With this in mind, adopting a similar career role to either parent may not be the right course of action. Therefore, parents should give your children freedom and time to discover their skills, then provide them encouragement to pursue their own interests and ambitions, and always support and respect their child’s decisions no matter it is their career choices, or family choices.

4. Is there any difference between children’s ambitions and those of grown-ups?

There is a huge difference between children and grown-ups when it comes to their ambitions. On the one hand, they often have grade-based goals, let’s say,  they want to make improvements or reach a specific milestone in their education, or get high scores or achieve the first rank in their class. And when they are at high school, they set more long-term goals, such as get accepted to their top three colleges, get a scholarship. On the other hand, for adults, they could no longer put academic achievements as their top priority, instead they can have a variety of goals depending on their lifestyle, personalities and beliefs. For some, they want to pursue fame and fortune, they want to live a luxury lifestyle with dream house, expensive cars, brand clothes, but for others, their goals are to live life to the fullest with travel, family relationship, or the freedom to follow their passions.